BOULDER — Myriah Conroy is 36 years old with dark, curly hair and a spray of freckles across her cheeks.

Most mornings, she takes her 2-year-old son to the playground so he can push toy trucks through the sandbox. And when Colorado voters go to the polls this year, she is one of the main reasons they will probably cast their ballots by paper.

“The cool thing about democracy I’ve learned,” she said, “is that it doesn’t take a lot of people to have an impact.”

In 2006, the Boulder resident was the lead plaintiff in Conroy vs. Dennis, the successful lawsuit that led Secretary of State Mike Coffman last year to decertify many of the electronic voting terminals and ballot scanners used in the state for not being accurate or secure enough.

That, in turn, ultimately led state lawmakers to introduce a bill mandating a primarily paper-ballot election this year. The measure, Senate Bill 189, is up for debate in a hearing this morning.

Lawmakers backing the bill, including Gov. Bill Ritter, often talk about paper ballots as “tried and true” and the best way to restore voter trust. But what they talk less frequently about is another motive driving the bill: the worry that voting activists will sue again if the state goes back to widespread use of electronic voting terminals.

“It’s a concern,” said Ritter’s spokesman, Evan Dreyer.

Conroy, who has worked in the computer industry, said she is not anti-technology. But, she said, electronic voting terminals are not secure or reliable enough to be trusted in an election, nor are they practical for the computer-unsavvy. She said that by leaning so heavily on machines to conduct elections, county clerks have effectively “privatized” elections.

“If the threat of litigation is what motivates (the legislature), in a way, that’s fine because it would not be frivolous,” she said. “It would be because we have laws that are being broken and court orders that are being violated.”

But Coffman, who opposes the paper-ballot bill, said the legislature shouldn’t allow the fear of lawsuits to set state law.

“It’s a pretty bad way to make public policy,” he said. “I would hope that if the General Assembly decides to use paper ballots as a primary means of voting, that they do so on the merits that it’s good public policy and not because they’ve been intimidated by a small outside group.”

Sen. Ken Gordon, D-Denver, one of the bill’s sponsors, said the risk of a lawsuit is a motivator to passing the bill. “Not because they’re threatening us,” he said. “But because I think they have a good case, and they would win.”

That would mean even more chaos for the state’s election system, something Conroy said she doesn’t want. “I’ll be happy,” she said, “if we get paper ballots.”

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